PC suddenly feels laggy, random BSOD

[Naweo]

Hello again Geekhack!

I am pleased to say I, once again, have PC problems.

After having solved black monitor issue, it now appears my PC starts to run very abnormally slow as I open various applications. Occasionally it results in BSOD as well, now I recall that happening for the second time, and as of a week ago, my PC could not boot and was constantly beeping (I ignored it first after a restart) but now I think there is a hardware issue. To be fair, the PC is useable, but laggy. I am starting a backup of my system as we speak.

I could suspect it's a CPU issue, but I have not been using the CPU with overclock almost at all.

Any suggestions on how to solve this?

Windows 11
I7 10700k CPU
3070 GPU Aorus
Asrock Steel Legend z490 Motherboard

[suicidal_orange]

There are usually error codes on the BSOD you can lookup to get clues.  Running memtest will check your RAM, if you get consistent errors in the same address you have a damaged stick, if they're random it could be CPU/motherboard.

Laggy is not a hardware failure though, unless maybe it's struggling to read a hard drive.  Once backed up attempt cleanup of virus/spyware or reinstall/repair Windows.

[Naweo]

I notice also after computer wakes up from sleep that some applications are simply frozen. This could sound like a memory/harddrive error, no?

[fohat.digs]

the PC is useable, but laggy.

Any suggestions on how to solve this?

Windows 11

My barely-2-year-old computer was lagging to the point that it took 2X-3X time to boot (and shut down) so I made the jump to Linux Mint.

That has had its challenges, the most frustrating and protracted being that I have never regained the ability to record with Audacity, but otherwise it seems pretty clean.

[Leslieann]

CPUs tend to either work or not and are extremely robust
It's FAR more likely to be the motherboard than the CPU, this is why there's an abundance of cheap old CPUS and few good old motherboards at decent prices.

Laggy can be a hardware failure, usually the hard drive or SATA cable. Check S.M.A.R.T. stats, if it's good, like S.O. said, do a re-install.

Best guess,
Is either hard drive failure (or cable) or a bad MS update or driver update.

[Leslieann]

My barely-2-year-old computer was lagging to the point that it took 2X-3X time to boot (and shut down) so I made the jump to Linux Mint.

That has had its challenges, the most frustrating and protracted being that I have never regained the ability to record with Audacity, but otherwise it seems pretty clean.

Try a thumbdrive with various distros, install Audacity and see if it will work on them.

Mint is a great starter distro, not so great once you start to spread your wings.

[tp4tissue]

this is why there's an abundance of cheap old CPUS and few good old motherboards at decent prices.

They've made millions of those z97 pc mate boards for mining.  you can get them by the kilo from (hina. 4-series is top salvage.

[Naweo]

Hey again all.

The smart seems to print my hard drives to be fine, and my windows is installed on a fresh gigabyte SSD that is 99% health and less than 2 years old from purchase.

RAM seems to be fine too.

Something weird happens sometimes is that my PC boots into the old windows on another installation, by itself, despite setting priorities in BIOS.

The PC goes smoothly after a restart, but then goes complete **** after about 10 hours of usage, almost unusable and super laggy. I work with many internet tabs open and I wonder if that is the cause of the issue. I just have very strong hardware so... seems odds that this should be the case.

But ever since I updated to windows 11 I seem to have problems constantly.

[Leslieann]

Something weird happens sometimes is that my PC boots into the old windows on another installation, by itself, despite setting priorities in BIOS.

Remove the boot files from that drive.
It's probably getting confused when a update is installed and redoes the boot record and bios and gets it wrong. You may get away with just removing the boot partitions (uefi/gpt) but there's times (Bios/mbr usually) where the only fix is move all the data you need to keep off of it, delete then rebuild the partition then put the data back,
 
Warning!!!!  Remove that drive first and make sure the system still boots before you do this!
If it does, feel free to remove the boot partitions, if it doesn't you can try a Windows install disk and repair it or put the drive back and live with it but don't just start deleting partitions and files.

The PC goes smoothly after a restart, but then goes complete **** after about 10 hours of usage, almost unusable and super laggy. I work with many internet tabs open and I wonder if that is the cause of the issue. I just have very strong hardware so... seems odds that this should be the case.

Hardware doesn't matter, at least not to the extent people think*, this is an I/O issue (and possibly a memory leak problem and even more likely a data harvesting problem**)
More ram and more cores help but only to a certain point, people think of ram and cores like roads, 6 lanes means 6 cars at a time, I/O however is more like the number of people in those cars and your cpu/ram can only process so many people at once, regardless of the number of cars. It is a hardware issue and it can be fixed but we're talking Threadripper and Xeons with 4 or more channels of memory and such with super high I/O, not just simply more cores or more memory.

The fix I tell people is multiple browsers.
Not two Chrome based, it needs to be different architectures, not only so they aren't fighting over resources but also so the system sees them as different and force them to play nice with each other and not hog everything they can. Not a perfect fix, but can help greatly.

Note that this is a bit over simplified and not very accurate but should get the point across.


*We're also reaching a point where the software itself is also a bottleneck, tricks to make old slow hardware seem fast is now holding back our speeds.  I know, "what Intel giveth Microsoft taketh away". This is different. It used to be the system would do other things while waiting on data to be fetched for example checking network connectivity while waiting on the desktop files to be fetched by the drive. Today the system asks for the desktop files to be sent then leaves to check network connectivity and the drive immediately comes back with the data going "where'd you go?" In extreme cases the cpu takes so long to get back to the drive that the drive has dumped the data because it thinks the CPU has decided it was no longer needed, this is an actual problem in data centers right now.

** I suspect trackers from closed pages/tabs are what are not clearing from memory, likely by design.

But ever since I updated to windows 11 I seem to have problems constantly.

Win11 is a sh*tshow.

I honestly have little hope it will ever be "right", just look at the troubles Win10 still has. How many years have they had to fix Win10?

[Naweo]

Something weird happens sometimes is that my PC boots into the old windows on another installation, by itself, despite setting priorities in BIOS.

Remove the boot files from that drive.
It's probably getting confused when a update is installed and redoes the boot record and bios and gets it wrong. You may get away with just removing the boot partitions (uefi/gpt) but there's times (Bios/mbr usually) where the only fix is move all the data you need to keep off of it, delete then rebuild the partition then put the data back,
 
Warning!!!!  Remove that drive first and make sure the system still boots before you do this!
If it does, feel free to remove the boot partitions, if it doesn't you can try a Windows install disk and repair it or put the drive back and live with it but don't just start deleting partitions and files.

The PC goes smoothly after a restart, but then goes complete **** after about 10 hours of usage, almost unusable and super laggy. I work with many internet tabs open and I wonder if that is the cause of the issue. I just have very strong hardware so... seems odds that this should be the case.

Hardware doesn't matter, at least not to the extent people think*, this is an I/O issue (and possibly a memory leak problem and even more likely a data harvesting problem**)
More ram and more cores help but only to a certain point, people think of ram and cores like roads, 6 lanes means 6 cars at a time, I/O however is more like the number of people in those cars and your cpu/ram can only process so many people at once, regardless of the number of cars. It is a hardware issue and it can be fixed but we're talking Threadripper and Xeons with 4 or more channels of memory and such with super high I/O, not just simply more cores or more memory.

The fix I tell people is multiple browsers.
Not two Chrome based, it needs to be different architectures, not only so they aren't fighting over resources but also so the system sees them as different and force them to play nice with each other and not hog everything they can. Not a perfect fix, but can help greatly.

Note that this is a bit over simplified and not very accurate but should get the point across.


*We're also reaching a point where the software itself is also a bottleneck, tricks to make old slow hardware seem fast is now holding back our speeds.  I know, "what Intel giveth Microsoft taketh away". This is different. It used to be the system would do other things while waiting on data to be fetched for example checking network connectivity while waiting on the desktop files to be fetched by the drive. Today the system asks for the desktop files to be sent then leaves to check network connectivity and the drive immediately comes back with the data going "where'd you go?" In extreme cases the cpu takes so long to get back to the drive that the drive has dumped the data because it thinks the CPU has decided it was no longer needed, this is an actual problem in data centers right now.

** I suspect trackers from closed pages/tabs are what are not clearing from memory, likely by design.

But ever since I updated to windows 11 I seem to have problems constantly.

Win11 is a sh*tshow.

I honestly have little hope it will ever be "right", just look at the troubles Win10 still has. How many years have they had to fix Win10?

Yes I see, so remove the drive and ensure the PC boots into the intended drive first?

I wanted to just move files from 1 folder to another and then just wipe it clean with formatting, was original plan.

Regarding the lag... I will try to see if I can get more browsers. I hoenstly do have multiple browsers but I have one particular one (chromium) condensed with 40-50 tabs. Might wanna at least split that up once.

[Naweo]

Something weird happens sometimes is that my PC boots into the old windows on another installation, by itself, despite setting priorities in BIOS.

Remove the boot files from that drive.
It's probably getting confused when a update is installed and redoes the boot record and bios and gets it wrong. You may get away with just removing the boot partitions (uefi/gpt) but there's times (Bios/mbr usually) where the only fix is move all the data you need to keep off of it, delete then rebuild the partition then put the data back,
 
Warning!!!!  Remove that drive first and make sure the system still boots before you do this!
If it does, feel free to remove the boot partitions, if it doesn't you can try a Windows install disk and repair it or put the drive back and live with it but don't just start deleting partitions and files.

The PC goes smoothly after a restart, but then goes complete **** after about 10 hours of usage, almost unusable and super laggy. I work with many internet tabs open and I wonder if that is the cause of the issue. I just have very strong hardware so... seems odds that this should be the case.

Hardware doesn't matter, at least not to the extent people think*, this is an I/O issue (and possibly a memory leak problem and even more likely a data harvesting problem**)
More ram and more cores help but only to a certain point, people think of ram and cores like roads, 6 lanes means 6 cars at a time, I/O however is more like the number of people in those cars and your cpu/ram can only process so many people at once, regardless of the number of cars. It is a hardware issue and it can be fixed but we're talking Threadripper and Xeons with 4 or more channels of memory and such with super high I/O, not just simply more cores or more memory.

The fix I tell people is multiple browsers.
Not two Chrome based, it needs to be different architectures, not only so they aren't fighting over resources but also so the system sees them as different and force them to play nice with each other and not hog everything they can. Not a perfect fix, but can help greatly.

Note that this is a bit over simplified and not very accurate but should get the point across.


*We're also reaching a point where the software itself is also a bottleneck, tricks to make old slow hardware seem fast is now holding back our speeds.  I know, "what Intel giveth Microsoft taketh away". This is different. It used to be the system would do other things while waiting on data to be fetched for example checking network connectivity while waiting on the desktop files to be fetched by the drive. Today the system asks for the desktop files to be sent then leaves to check network connectivity and the drive immediately comes back with the data going "where'd you go?" In extreme cases the cpu takes so long to get back to the drive that the drive has dumped the data because it thinks the CPU has decided it was no longer needed, this is an actual problem in data centers right now.

** I suspect trackers from closed pages/tabs are what are not clearing from memory, likely by design.

But ever since I updated to windows 11 I seem to have problems constantly.

Win11 is a sh*tshow.

I honestly have little hope it will ever be "right", just look at the troubles Win10 still has. How many years have they had to fix Win10?

I can tell you... shutting down my browser with many tavbs definitely helps with lag.

So tell me... Can you give me 8 new browsers I can use.... That is not firefox, edge, chrome, brave, opera or vivaldi...?

Otherwise I am ****ed lol

[Leslieann]

I wanted to just move files from 1 folder to another and then just wipe it clean with formatting, was original plan.

If you're going that far (and it is the best option),  go into computer management and remove all the partitions first.

Regarding the lag... I will try to see if I can get more browsers. I hoenstly do have multiple browsers but I have one particular one (chromium) condensed with 40-50 tabs. Might wanna at least split that up once.

You can also try breaking it into multiple windows, not as good as multiple browsers, but still better than all in one window.

Note, both options will make the system use more ram, but that's part of the problem, the system is only allowing it so much and then it starts compressing and caching.
Also, Chrome is pretty much THE WORST for this. Brave will cut ram use way down, as will Firefox, running adblock will reduce them even more. The difference between either with Adblock vs Chrome without is staggering.


Here's a whole bunch of info about browser memory (and cpu load)
https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=103373.0

[Leslieann]

I can tell you... shutting down my browser with many tavbs definitely helps with lag.

So tell me... Can you give me 8 new browsers I can use.... That is not firefox, edge, chrome, brave, opera or vivaldi...?

Otherwise I am ****ed lol

Closing helps for a while but at some point that too catches up to you and a reboot is the only option.


There is only 3 browsers.
You have Blink (Chrome based), Mozilla (Firefox), and Webkit (Vivaldi, Safari).
Pretty much every browser is built on top of those.

You're going to have to learn to work with it, change bad habits or spend a lot of money to fix it, either a pro grade processor with tons of ram or switch to Apple.



And it's not actually the number of tabs open, it's what's in those tabs that gets you. You can have 300 tabs open without a problem or you can have 30 tabs open and crash, it depends on the content. Places with eternal scroll such as Reddit are MURDER on a browser. Safari tends to handle this best, not sure if Vivaldi will do the same since it could be Apple OS memory management helping here (which is really good!). Loads of videos are also brutal. Tracking will also cause issues and if you've never run Ublock Origin with the number of items blocked showing, you'd be amazed at just how much is tracking you, I've seen pages push over a thousand trackers given enough time on the page.

Reddit is one of the absolute worst websites for this, every entry on the page is loading not just the header, but the actual thread and comments, all it lacks is the page formatting.
News sites are prone to tracker overload. If possible, load all your worst sites into one browser, everything else in another.

On Firefox, look into containers.
You can basically give each site it's own private cache and memory, doing this really helped with my lag as each site not only cannot share data, but also forces them to act as a new window without being in a new window. It does take some work to setup and if you do, make sure all your shopping sites use the same container otherwise you will try and checkout on Ebay and your Paypal login will open in a new container and not transfer the details...  Also put all your Google in one, again, otherwise your login for Drive will not work with Gmail when you switch sites. Once done though, works well.

[Naweo]

I wanted to just move files from 1 folder to another and then just wipe it clean with formatting, was original plan.

If you're going that far (and it is the best option),  go into computer management and remove all the partitions first.

Regarding the lag... I will try to see if I can get more browsers. I hoenstly do have multiple browsers but I have one particular one (chromium) condensed with 40-50 tabs. Might wanna at least split that up once.

You can also try breaking it into multiple windows, not as good as multiple browsers, but still better than all in one window.

Note, both options will make the system use more ram, but that's part of the problem, the system is only allowing it so much and then it starts compressing and caching.
Also, Chrome is pretty much THE WORST for this. Brave will cut ram use way down, as will Firefox, running adblock will reduce them even more. The difference between either with Adblock vs Chrome without is staggering.


Here's a whole bunch of info about browser memory (and cpu load)
https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=103373.0

Once I remove partitions I "simply" just have to add them back? I assume the files will be deleted with removed partitions.

I found these disk 2 partitions that exist on the drive I want to wipe:

https://i.gyazo.com/42df2d9c8c4b70727824cf2decae2e27.png

[tp4tissue]

back to win 10 quick...!!

[Naweo]

back to win 10 quick...!!

Honstly... Yes... haha

[Leslieann]

Once I remove partitions I "simply" just have to add them back? I assume the files will be deleted with removed partitions.

Yes, but you should be able to just add a single one back.

[Naweo]

Once I remove partitions I "simply" just have to add them back? I assume the files will be deleted with removed partitions.

Yes, but you should be able to just add a single one back.

I attempted to delete the partition, but now it just boots into startup repair automatically (and forces a shutdown after.)

I don't think I correctly deleted the partitions on the drive

Can I try with "diskpart" administartor powershell?

[Leslieann]

I attempted to delete the partition, but now it just boots into startup repair automatically (and forces a shutdown after.)

I don't think I correctly deleted the partitions on the drive

Remove the second drive, boot it, that should correct the EFI menu, then put it back.

If it still keeps doing it,
You can have basic and logical partitions as well as dynamic and extended, sort of like sub partitions and those will hide the main partition.
Keep deleting partitions until none are left, then create a basic partition or if you truly want to nuke it, fire up a Linux drive (Mint or Ubuntu), open Gparted and from the top menu select "Device", then "create a partition table" (GPT is what you want). Just make sure you select the right drive, Linux does what you tell it, it will not nanny you.

[Naweo]

I attempted to delete the partition, but now it just boots into startup repair automatically (and forces a shutdown after.)

I don't think I correctly deleted the partitions on the drive

Remove the second drive, boot it, that should correct the EFI menu, then put it back.

If it still keeps doing it,
You can have basic and logical partitions as well as dynamic and extended, sort of like sub partitions and those will hide the main partition.
Keep deleting partitions until none are left, then create a basic partition or if you truly want to nuke it, fire up a Linux drive (Mint or Ubuntu), open Gparted and from the top menu select "Device", then "create a partition table" (GPT is what you want). Just make sure you select the right drive, Linux does what you tell it, it will not nanny you.

Not quite sure what you mean by booting into that drive. If I do, it will do startup repair. Only my main, primary drive has windows installed.

The other partitions in the drive I intend to erase does not have a "delete" option like the primary volume inside the drive did.

I just want my PC to boot into my main drive and stop attempting to boot into the second drive, not sure if there was a miscommunication.

[Leslieann]

Not quite sure what you mean by booting into that drive. If I do, it will do startup repair. Only my main, primary drive has windows installed.

I meant for you to remove the drive then boot the system.

The other partitions in the drive I intend to erase does not have a "delete" option like the primary volume inside the drive did.

I just want my PC to boot into my main drive and stop attempting to boot into the second drive, not sure if there was a miscommunication.

This is why I said to boot the system without the second drive first, the system is probably using those partitions to boot and has locked them.

[Naweo]

Alright, I am IQ 70.

Lets dissect this.

Drive 1: Has windows, functional
Drive 2: Has windows, NOT functional. I want to wipe it.

So:

Remove drive 1, then boot

or

Remove drive 2, Then boot

Which is it? And once done, how do I remove partitions from drive 2, if I am removing a drive?

Sorry for clarification

[Leslieann]

Drive 1: Has windows, functional
Drive 2: Has windows, NOT functional. I want to wipe it.
Remove drive 1, then boot
or
Remove drive 2, Then boot
Which is it? And once done, how do I remove partitions from drive 2, if I am removing a drive?

Remove the non functioning Windows drive (drive 2).

Once you know the system boots, put the drive back in and delete everything on it.